This week, Mark Zuckerberg showed the world his new baby. Facebook’s Graph Search — a venture with a name so unimaginative it could quell the excitement of even the most loyal Zuck-worshipper — allows users to perform personalised searches. The information garnered — on restaurants, shops or films, say — comes from your own social network.

Whether most people would prefer the views of friends (loosely defined) to those of critics remains to be tested, but some tech experts consider it a potential threat to Google. Zuckerberg doesn’t just want to triumph over the search engine, though: he wants Facebook to become the vehicle through which we do everything online. Our internet mothership.

What irks me is that he is building this giant database by clinging on to our information ever more desperately.

Over Christmas, I spent a few hours on Facebook for the first time in about eight months. Although I still share some of my columns in the shamelessly self-promoting way now expected of journalists, I have largely stopped signing in, as my feed has become a cacophony of trivialities: an abundance of information I neither want nor need. It makes a backlog of pokes no longer seem pressing.

My reason for returning was to cull the information about me on there — photos, links, posts. When I joined Facebook seven years ago, I had the lax attitude to privacy typical of a 21-year-old but it was at least straightfoward then to edit everything. This time, I had to turn to Facebook’s help function to find out how to de-tag myself from pictures and delete entire albums. The process was then laborious. I should confess to being something of a Luddite but even for the technologically minded, a cull has become a hassle.

It’s a bit like having a shop where the entrance has a 10 foot-high neon flashing light above it but the exit is hidden behind a secret door. A store where you can find products really easily, but if you ever want to empty the trolley, the shelves will have moved around like the Harry Potter staircase.

Facebook presumably thinks it wants information to be easy to share but hard to remove. That’s because the more information it has, the more valuable it becomes not only to members, but to advertisers. Expect companies eventually to muscle in on Graph Search.

But my hunch is that Facebook’s leech-like approach will prove a mistake. The desire to share online isn’t some compulsion we could never escape. I have largely grown out of it. Privacy may come back into vogue. Perhaps it is already starting to: a record 600,000 UK users didn’t visit Facebook in December.

And if it’s a pain to start culling the information that the site holds on you, there’s always a fast way to do it. Facebook may find itself permanently de-friended.

The sorry state of Armstrong’s TV apology

At ungodly o’clock tomorrow morning, the first half of Lance Armstrong’s Oprah Winfrey confessional will be broadcast. In summary: it definitely wasn’t all about the bike.

Armstrong has already spoken to staff at the Livestrong charity in Austin, Texas, the land of the yellow plastic bracelet. There, according to a spokeswoman, he gave an “expression of regret over any stress they’ve suffered ... as a result of the media attention”. Ah, so that’s what the issue has been: the media attention.

This non-apology doesn’t bode well for tomorrow. By stretching it over two hours, Armstrong is breaking another rule of saying sorry too. As Dorothy Parker put it: “When you have to apologise, it is well, I suppose, to get the thing over quickly.”

Lies, damned lies and estate agents’ particulars

Much about the market is ridiculous. Rents. House prices. The way pictures on property sites are usually taken at some bizarre angle and from an adjacent room so that a space looks twice the size.

A part of the insanity that can sometimes raise a wry smile, though, is the estate agent or landlord half-truth. There are the well-documented cases of doublespeak. “Cosy” translates as a Hobbit hole. “An up-and-coming area” means the kind of place where TfL has to play classical music in local stations to stop residents from punching one another.

My favourite I’ve found in my hunt for a first home is the “split-level flat” that was so-described because the loo was on a landing. I studied the floorplan, trying to determine where that extra floor was, before working out that it was halfway up the stairs.

A quick Twitter poll threw up much worse linguistic sins, though. A “two-bedroom flat” where the second bedroom was a windowless cupboard. The property “adjacent to a popular restaurant” that was actually above a fried chicken shop.

The worst: a tenant walked into a flat and asked: “Does it come with a bed?” To which the landlord replied: “Yes: you’re standing on it.” She was standing on a sheet.

Salute the sacrifice of poor MPs

Apparently our public servants have long been ludicrously overpaid. So this week, the Tories have slashed the starting salary in the police to £19,000; last year they deemed doctors “greedy” for daring to suggest the Government might keep a promise about pensions. There is an exception, though: our hard-working MPs, who are still nobly sacrificing themselves for the nation despite being paid just £65,738 — 32 per cent less than they think they deserve.